Easy fixes sometimes are anything but

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Joe Weber

Contrasting the Trump and Harris economic planS

Politicians like easy-sounding solutions to complex problems, particularly on the economic front. Their fixes often are aimed at pleasing voters who know little or nothing of economics. At times, their efforts smack of pandering and might even be harmless.

But, at other times, they can be quite dangerous — as seems likely with the plans of Donald J. Trump. Just mull over what 16 Nobel laureate economists have to say:

“The outcome of this election will have economic repercussions for years, and possibly decades, to come,” warns a letter signed by Columbia Prof. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank; Harvard Prof. Claudia Goldin, former director of the Development of the American Economy program at the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research, and 14 other Nobelists. “We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”

They caution that Trump’s plans, including his goal to impose tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on foreign goods and 60 percent on Chinese-made products, will do exactly the opposite of what he’s been promising as he has attacked the Biden-Harris administration for inflation. Just as inflation rates are coming down, those duties would kickstart a price-spiral anew.

“Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast,” the economists argue. “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets. Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation.”

And listen to some of those folks, who’ve crunched the numbers on Trump’s plans:

“The Peterson Institute for International Economics think-tank in Washington calculates that 20 per cent across-the-board tariffs combined with a 60 per cent tariff on China would trigger a rise of up to $2,600 a year in what the average household spends on goods,” reports the Financial Times. “They say that the tariffs would disproportionately hit the low-income households that Trump claims his economic policies help protect.”

And the Peterson Institute is hardly alone. The Tax Policy Center, concurs, albeit with slightly different figures because Trump has floated both 20 percent and 10 percent global tariffs.

“A worldwide 10 percent tariff and a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods proposed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would lower average after-tax incomes of US households in 2025 by about $1,800, or 1.8 percent,” writes center senior fellow Howard Gleckman, a former BusinessWeek colleague. “They’d reduce imports into the US by about $5.5 trillion, or 15 percent, from 2025–2034.”

The consensus among the experts is that Trump’s plan would hit consumers hard. The effect would show up not only in finished goods made overseas, but in anything manufactured in the U.S. with foreign-made components, as the higher costs would filter through the system. Thus, there would be no escaping the higher prices.

Beyond just ratcheting up inflation, Trump’s plans could drive down gross domestic product and employment.

“Candidate Trump has proposed significant tariff hikes as part of his presidential campaign; we estimate that if imposed, his proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by another $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent, the capital stock by 0.7 percent, and employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” says another nonpartisan group, the Tax Foundation.

The kick in the teeth that Trump could deliver to the nation may also come at a tough time, as the economy slows under the Federal Reserve’s so-called “soft-landing” approach. The Fed, the independent group that has the job of reining in inflation, recently lowered interest rates by a substantial half-point in the federal funds rate. That’s because its leaders believe that inflation is moving toward a sustainable 2 percent annual rate, the Fed’s target, without driving unemployment up to unacceptable levels.

The Federal Reserve, source: Investopedia

As the Fed tries to balance employment and inflation, it is no doubt mindful that the national jobless rate recently rose to 4.2 percent after dipping as low as 3.4 percent, a 54-year-low, earlier in the year. The Fed is following classic economic theory: when the jobless rate is too low, higher wages kick up inflation; when unemployment is too high, of course, that’s a red light for the economy.

In time, the lower interest rates that the Fed has engineered should deliver an upward jolt to the economy. That will set the stage for the next president – whoever that is – to bask in the glow of sustainably low unemployment with reasonable inflation. But that president’s policies, if they are inflationary, could tip the balance.

As the experts see it, the outlook under a Trump presidency is hardly cheerful, particularly if his tariffs trigger an all-out global trade war. “The last time we were in a trade war under Trump, the global manufacturing cycle went into a recession,” Julia Coronado, a former Fed economist who now runs the MacroPolicy Perspectives consultancy, told the Financial Times.

Recall that, during Trump’s term, the economy slipped into recession from February to April 2020, a few months before his tour in the White House ended. Covid drove that downturn, which was marked by a jobless rate of 14.8 percent in April of 2020. When Trump left office, the jobless rate had fallen to 6.4 percent and it fell substantially after that, in part thanks to the infrastructure-spending policies of President Joe Biden.

Contrast Trump’s plan with Harris’s blueprint for stimulating housing construction, particularly for the middle class. She wants to boost housing supply by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, providing incentives for state and local investment in housing and creating a $40 billion tax credit to make affordable projects feasible for builders. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, and Jim Parrott, a housing adviser under the Obama administration, estimate that America has a shortfall of three million homes right now, and Harris aims to close that gap. The two are advising her campaign on these plans.

Ben Harris of the Brookings Institution, a former chief economist of the U.S. Treasury, concurs that the plan is sound. “Critics assail the high cost of subsidies to developers, but they are the best tool the federal government has to incentivize homebuilding,” he writes. “We desperately need more affordable homes in America – millions of them – and the only practical way to boost supply quickly and meaningfully is to offer financial incentives to local governments to expand zoning for affordable housing and to developers to build it. The vice president proposes to do both.”

To be sure, Harris’s plan to provide $25,000 to first-time homebuyers is drawing less praise.

Calling that “a really bad idea,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, says: “The ultimate beneficiary of that credit is not going to be first-time home buyers. It’s going to be people selling homes.” Economics writer Peter Coy of The New York Times echoes that, saying the plan would do nothing to boost housing stock, but only demand. “Sellers surely would take advantage of the increased demand by raising their prices,” Coy writes. “So a big portion of the taxpayer money that was intended for home buyers would wind up in the pockets of sellers.”

But it’s far from clear how the construction stimulation efforts and the aid to homebuyers would offset one another. A rush of homebuilding in theory should lead to lower prices, and the numbers of people likely to be involved in her $25,000 support effort seem relatively small.

Moody’s estimates that Harris’s down-payment plan would help some 11.7 million more first-time homebuyers, including 2.75 million first-time Black and Latino homeowners. This is just 3.2 million more first-time homebuyers and 1 million more Black and Latino first-time homebuyers than would take place without her plan.

For her part, Harris is doing some pandering by proposing to attack alleged price-gouging, particularly in grocery costs. Quoting a campaign statement, The Washington Post reported that Harris wants to implement “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

The details were not clear, the Post reported. But it said Harris would aim to enact the ban within her first 100 days, in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose harsh penalties on firms that break new limits on so-called gouging. The statement did not define gouging or excessive profits.

As Alexander Henke, an economics professor at Howard University, told the school newspaper, Harris’s “vague” plan appears to be more like a political economy move than an economic one, tapping into popular sentiment against price gouging by delivering poll-tested messaging. And Harris should know better — she studied economics at Howard and her father, Donald, is a retired Stanford University economics professor.

What’s more, this horse long ago left the barn. Most of the inflation is now behind us, suggesting that the economy is resolving the inflation on its own and there would be few prosecutions.

Just look at the numbers. Prices for food overall rose 9.9 percent in 2022, faster than in any year since 1979, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The hike was especially sharp in so-called food-at-home prices, up 11.4 percent. But the rises have slowed since then, climbing last year by 5.8 percent overall and by 5 percent for food-at-home. This year, the department expects prices for all food to increase 2.3 percent, with food-at-home prices rising just 1.2 percent.

What drove up prices in prior years? Were greedy corporations taking advantage of consumers? Were nefarious or misguided Biden-Harris policies driving up the price of eggs (something VP nominee JD Vance embarrassingly got wrong in a Pennsylvania grocery store photo-op)?

Not according to experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They point to post-Covid volatility in global commodity prices and a sharp rise in wages for grocery-store workers (likely related to a shortage of such workers). When such “input” costs rise, everyone in the production and retail chain tries to sustain their profit margins. As it happened, foodmakers showed no margin gain in recent years, while retailers showed only a modest uptick in already-thin margins.

Other key elements of the plans of both candidates suggest far different approaches — Trump would take a largely top-down tack while Harris, as she puts it, aims to build the economy from the middle class out. She hit hard on this theme in a Sept. 25 address on the economy and her idea are spelled out on her website.

Harris would boost the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and she has promised not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. She wants to restore and expand the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, including a $6,000 child tax credit for the first year of a newborn’s life. She would also increase the tax deduction for start-up businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, a move she argues would stimulate innovation among all-important small businesses.

By contrast, Trump wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent for companies that make their products in the U.S. He already cut the rate from 35 percent during his 2017-2021 presidency. It’s long been known that such moves deplete government revenues. Trump also said he would end taxes on overtime pay and on tips (the tips idea is one Harris also suggests). And Trump also aims to exempt Social Security income from taxes, unmindful apparently of how the Social Security system, even under the current system, will likely be insolvent by 2035 unless policymakers impose a fix.

Trump also wants to extend individual tax cuts he pushed through Congress in 2017, including for the wealthiest Americans. Experts estimate that would reduce revenue over a decade by about $3.3 trillion to $4 trillion.

Harris has also proposed hiking taxes on high-income earners. Americans earning below about $100,000 annually would continue to pay no taxes on long-term capital gains and higher-income families earning up to $1 million would continue paying up to a maximum rate of 20 percent. But those who earn $1 million a year or more would see a rise in the tax rate on their long-term capital gains to 28 percent.

Whether soaking the rich a bit, as Harris proposes, is good or bad economically, it may sell politically. And, if nothing else, it’s likely to do far less harm than Trump’s tariffs would.

Nebraska may matter again

Posted on September 22, 2024 by Joe Weber

How antidemocratic efforts could sway a presidential election

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” French journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Consider 1968 and 2024. There are big differences, of course, but in some ways the years are echoing one another, especially in the pivotal role Nebraska may again play in a presidential election.

Nebraska’s public TV station in 2008 produced a documentary about the state’s key role in the election of over a half-century ago. The piece, “‘68: The Year Nebraska Mattered,” ably charted the ways presidential contenders courted support in the state.

The documentarians may have even more reason to revisit the theme about this year.

Recall that in 1968, the country was beset by often-violent polarization. Vietnam was tearing us apart, pitting young people against old, conservatives against liberals. Racism was a huge issue, as the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. provoked rioting across the country.

An openly racist strongman candidate for president thought Nebraska was so important to his campaign that he appeared in Omaha. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, came to the state to court voters for his American Independence Party. His visit triggered rioting in the then-small city and he drew condemnation from the state’s Republican governor, Norbert Tiemann, among many others.

Meanwhile, Democrats also stormed the state for their primary. Sens. Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy both came to woo convention delegates, hoping to beat incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the nomination. On the Republican side, Richard Nixon vied with New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to his left and Ronald Reagan on the party’s right. Nixon, who was trying for a comeback after losing the 1960 presidential election, stumped for voters in Omaha, too.

As it turned out, Nixon swept Nebraska for the GOP ticket. While Kennedy won over the Nebraska Democrats, his assassination on June 5 left the party ultimately with Humphrey. And, in the end, Nixon prevailed nationally, overwhelming both Wallace and Humphrey that November.

Now, Nebraska is looming large again – even larger this time — as Donald J. Trump presses legislators in the state to overturn its practice, dating back to legislation in 1991, of splitting its Electoral College votes by Congressional district. Nebraska will have five such electoral votes and Trump fears that he will lose one such vote, that of the 2^nd District, comprising Omaha and its suburbs. While the state overall went for Trump in 2020, he lost that Omaha area electoral vote.

The district has gone twice for Republicans and twice for Democrats in the last four presidential elections, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner. To avoid a repeat of his 2020 loss, Trump wants the state legislature to switch over to the winner-take-all system that prevails in other states, a change that would, in effect, disenfranchise many Omaha-area voters, as the rest of Nebraska tends to go GOP.

As polls suggest that there will be a tight vote nationally, just a single vote in the Electoral College could put Harris over the top, giving her the 270 she would need. Thus, Trump’s electoral gamesmanship.

Unsurprisingly, the opportunistic Republican governor of Nebraska, Jim Pillen, backs Trump’s efforts. But, so far, he hasn’t amassed enough support among the state’s legislators to do this. Pillen went so far as to bring a couple dozen Republican legislators to his mansion to hear an in-person pitch for eliminating the electoral rule from Sen. Lindsey Graham, as the Examiner reported. Trump also spoke by phone beforehand with some of the attendees.

The only other state to have a similar split-vote rule is Maine, which has taken that approach since 1969. So far, however, legislators in the Democratically dominated state have balked at making a change, even though that could help Democrats by taking away a likely GOP single electoral vote. Trump carried a single Maine district in both 2016 and 2020, getting one of the state’s four votes.

The states each award a single Electoral College vote to the winner in each of their congressional districts, plus two votes to the statewide winner of the popular vote.

Maine pioneered the split-vote system as part of an effort to push the country toward a system where the popular vote matters more than the Electoral College does, as the Bangor Daily News reported. Recall that five presidents, including George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016, lost the popular vote but prevailed in the college vote. Trump was swamped in both in 2020, though he continues to deny that.

Trump’s effort to overturn the Nebraska split-vote practice is of a piece with his general antidemocracy approach, of course. His supporters recently enacted a rule in Georgia to require counting ballots by hand, which would likely delay results and, according to critics, could lead to many errors. The change is being challenged in court.

Recall that Trump infamously tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes to put him over the top in the state in 2020. Trump’s phone call to the official was filled with a slew of false claims by the former president, as the Brennan Center documented.

Recall, too, Trump’s efforts to discredit elections all across the country. More than 60 court cases went against him, including many that involved judges appointed by Trump and other Republicans.

If he does win this fall, Trump’s intentions to subvert democracy are troubling, whether they involve electoral manipulation, concentrating more power in the White House or summoning the military to suppress dissent. His plans — some of which are based on Project 2025, despite his disavowal of the document — have been criticized by such nonpartisan groups as the ACLU and Protect Democracy, along with Democratic leaders from President Biden on down.

Trump has long been an admirer of autocrats, even praising one, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, by name in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. The former president warmed to the idea of being a dictator on day one in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. And his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, recently shared a stage with autocrat-loving Tucker Carlson, a disgraced former Fox News host turned podcaster. Carlson did a fawning interview with Vladimir Putin and recently gushed over a Holocaust denier on his podcast.

If Trump defeats Harris — with or without overturning the Nebraska system — his bid to upend the longstanding split-vote approach in Nebraska may just be a sign of what more is to come. Much has changed since the state made a difference in 1968, but we again see a racist demagogue with a strongman approach trying to make a mark in Nebraska at a time of great polarization. The biggest difference this time is that he’s got much of the state’s Republican establishment behind him.

State Sen. Mike McDonnell, source: Nebraska Examiner

The choice of whether to toss out split-voting could be close — maybe even a matter of a single vote in Nebraska’s Republican legislative ranks. Fittingly, that may hinge on local Omaha politics, according to the Examiner. State Sen. Mike McDonnell, a labor leader and Democrat-turned-Republican, aspires to run for mayor of the city.

Would his constituents want to support someone who made their votes irrelevant? When he switched parties, McDonnell said he opposed a shift to winner-take-all. A spokesman said he’s sticking with that stance — for now.

And will antidemocratic efforts prevail nationally? If so, the path to those may begin in the state capitol of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Unfinished business

Posted on September 18, 2024 by Joe Weber

As the Trump-Harris race shows us, sexism remains alive and well

Fifty-four years ago this Sept. 19, Mary Tyler Moore launched an eponymous hit series on CBS about a young woman who was “gonna make it after all” as a TV journalist in Minneapolis. “Mary Richards” would build a life for herself as an independent woman. The show ran for seven seasons and won a stunning 29 Emmys. Widely hailed for being part of so-called Second Wave Feminism, which focused on equality and discrimination, the series dealt with sex, sexism, birth control and other hot-button topics of the time.

Debuting as women were surging into the workplace in larger numbers, the Mary Tyler Moore Show paved the way for other TV efforts that revolved around women demanding to be on equal footing with men. Among them were “Rhoda,” “Murphy Brown,” “30 Rock” and, in some respects, “Friends” and “Cheers,” all heavily influenced by Moore’s groundbreaking effort.

How can it be that a half-century on from then America has still not left the battles over sexism behind? How can it be that for the current generation of women political figures such as Donald J. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, are doing their best to remind us of what, in many respects, were the bad old days? How can it be that gender remains an issue for many Americans as they ponder whether a woman can serve as president?

Women now approaching their 60s — such as Vice President Kamala Harris, 59 — were children when “Mary Richards” was challenging glass ceilings on Moore’s show. But, all around them, real women were doing the same.

Harris’s late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, for instance, came to the United States from India alone at 19, earned a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology from the University of California Berkeley, and went on to make important contributions as a researcher focusing on breast cancer. As a single mom, moreover, she raised Harris and her sister after splitting up with Harris’s father.

As gains that women have made are under siege now, it’s no surprise that Harris should adopt as one of her campaign mantras “We are not going back.” In counterpoint to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” evocation of a mythical American past, Harris’s tagline suggests progress in matters such as reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, Black and other minority rights, and a modern version of feminism — one in which a woman can become not only the first female vice president, but president.

Harris would have America “turn the page” — another tagline — on Trumpism. That, pathology, as she sees it, is the 78-year-old former president’s use of racial divisiveness, his juvenile treatment of opponents, and his well-recorded disrespect for the military, his disregard for the law (as his felony criminal convictions suggest) — along with his sexism.

Trump’s attitudes and actions toward women, of course, seem like something on which turning the page seems well overdue. Recall Trump’s lewdness in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. Take note of his sexual abasement of E. Jean Carroll, after which juries found him liable for abuse and defamation, costing him more than $90 million. Don’t dismiss his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and his extramarital affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal, part of his well-documented pattern of cheating on three wives.

Remember that about two dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1970s. Recall that his first wife, Ivana, accused him of rape during their 1990 divorce (she later retracted her claim). Another woman accused him of “attempted rape” in 1993 at his Mar-a-Lago resort, but settled a separate breach of contract case and forfeited the rape claim. Still another alleged that Trump attacked her on a flight to New York. Trump denied it all.

Just how vile is he? He looks on own daughter, Ivanka, in, well, a less than fatherly way. “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her. Isn’t that terrible? How terrible? Is that terrible?,” he said in 2006 on ABC’s “The View.” And, in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Trump reportedly celebrated her “beauty,” adding, “If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father …” He was even rebuked by his former chief of staff for sexual remarks about Ivanka in front of White House staff.

Trump’s extraordinary litany of public comments define him, too. To pick three from a very long list, he labeled his own former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and former Gov. Nikki Haley “birdbrain,” said “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?,” and said of talk show host Megyn Kelly “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” He slandered Harris as “Dumb as a Rock,” only to be humiliated by the former California State Attorney General and former U.S. Senator’s brilliance in skewering him in their debate.

Fortunately, many American women have long had Trump’s number. “President Joe Biden won women by 15 points over Trump in 2020, according to exit polls, up from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s 13-point victory among women in 2016,” The Washington Post reported. “Polls suggest that this year, women prefer Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris over Trump by similar margins. Harris led Trump by 13 points among women in an ABC News/Ipsos poll” released in early September.

Disdain for Trump is especially pronounced among younger women — even while younger men don’t shun him quite as much. “Sixty-seven percent of women 18 to 29 supported Vice President Kamala Harris in a New York Times/Siena College poll in six swing states last month, compared with 40% of young men,” The New York Times reported. “Fifty-three percent of young men in those states backed Donald J. Trump, compared with 29% of young women.”

Still, substantial numbers of women back Trump, in spite of his misogyny and coarseness. Trump has implied that Harris’s former romantic relationship with Willie Brown, a former San Francisco mayor, fueled her political success. And as the Times reported, he recently shared a screenshot on Truth Social showing an image of Harris and Hillary Clinton, appended with commentary from another user, with a reference to oral sex.

Asked by a Times reporter what she thought about Trump posting that image, co-founder of Moms For Liberty Tiffany Justice stammered: “You know what, I think that, uh, a lot of people say a lot of things. And we’re focused on the issues that are hurting American voters.”

Women who support Trump seem willing to turn their eyes away from a lot. Like Melania Trump, who suggested that her husband’s celebration of sexual assault in the Hollywood Access tape was just “locker room talk,” they wave aside his depravity.

Evangelical women who back him may see Trump as the sinner who is G-d’s tainted vehicle in areas such as abortion, although his waffling on the matter — declining to endorse a national ban — lately has irked many of them and smacked of betrayal. As he has sought to win over women concerned about such bans, Christian leaders have suggested his backpedaling could dissuade religious voters from showing up on Election Day. R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminar, told The New York Times’ The Run-Up podcast that Trump faces the “grave danger” of evangelicals staying home on Nov. 5.

Harris and her team, however, are busy reminding voters that Trump just last spring proudly claimed to have destroyed the protections of Roe v. Wade by appointing Supreme Court justices who gutted the longstanding legal precedent. “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump said on his social media platform.

Trump, moreover, has lost some of his base even among evangelical women. The Rev. Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Jerushah Duford, famously condemned Trump in 2020. “How did we get here?,” she asked in a USA Today piece exhorting others to abandon him. “How did we, as God-fearing women, find ourselves ignoring the disrespect and misogyny being shown from our president? …. Jesus loved women; He served women; He valued women. We need to give ourselves permission to stand up to do the same.”

In mid-August, Duford made her support of Harris clear, taking part in an “Evangelicals for Harris” Zoom call. “Voting Kamala, for me, is so much greater than policies,” Duford said. “It’s a vote against another four years of faith leaders justifying the actions of a man who destroys the message Jesus came to spread, and that is why I get involved in politics.”

Will more women turn out for Harris? They might if they look into Trump’s history more closely, along with the views of his “childless cat ladies” running mate, Vance. The GOP vice presidential nominee apparently would have many women of the Mary Tyler Moore generation revisit their child-rearing days with grandchildren and give parents more voting power than childless Americans.

“In 2020, [Vance] did not demur when the podcast host Eric Weinstein asserted that helping care for youngsters was ‘the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,’” The Atlantic reported. “The next year, Vance suggested that parents should have ‘more power—you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic—than people who don’t have kids.’ He also tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.’”

In past elections when Trump ran, the gender gap was substantial. This time around, it could prove to be a yawning chasm. And when one explores why, the question arises: How could any self-respecting woman, of any age and any religion and any race, support this man?

“Shining city on the hill” or “a nation in decline”?

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Joe Weber

The facts don’t bear out Trump’s doomsaying — at least in economic terms

In a memorable election debate with President Jimmy Carter on Oct. 28, 1980, GOP nominee Ronald Reagan asked Americans: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

Amid the stagflation and rising unemployment of the time, many were not. So Reagan went on to turn Carter into a one-term president. Reagan even won the popular vote (unlike Donald J. Trump in 2016). And he went on to serve two terms.

That “better-off” question is rising again, of course (as it often has in presidential races). As one might expect, Fox News has bruited it, citing a poll the outlet took last spring that suggested 52% of voters felt worse off. Still, in a poll a bit later by The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College, the outlook was similar, as more than half of registered voters in six battleground states rated the economy as “poor.” Many Americans even wrongly think we’re in recession.

Like many of those voters, some of my relatives are answering “No” to the “better-off” question, saying they felt richer during the Trump years than they have during the Biden-Harris term. And a libertarian friend argued the same point, contending that the reasons many Americans back Trump are not based in racism or sexism, but rather on economics. They just don’t think Democratic policies have helped them, he said.

But are we, in fact, better off? Do the data substantiate or undercut the often-partisan feelings, deeply felt as they may be?

Without seeing their tax returns, of course, we can’t know whether certain individuals have fared better or not since January 2021. We don’t know how their businesses have done or how they have coped if they are on fixed incomes (though Social Security boosts for costs of living of 8.7% in 2023 and 3.2% this year may have helped).

But we can explore the so-called national “vibecession” to see if it is based in facts or is just a matter of hazy memories. And recall that some of those memories have been demagogically reinforced by Trump’s inaccurate bravado about overseeing the greatest economy in world history.

“Nostalgia’s rosy glow makes almost all presidents more popular after they leave office,” Los Angeles Times journalist David Lauter writes. “[T]hat effect may have been especially sharp this time because the steep inflation of 2021 and 2022 caused voters to fondly recall the good economy of Trump’s first three years in office; and younger voters may have only vague memories of Trump controversies that took place in their teenage years.”

Certainly, we must concede that inflation has been a bear, especially for lower-income folks:

Indeed, because higher prices are baked in, it may not help former Vice President Kamala Harris that inflation has moderated substantially this year. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Sept. 11, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose just 0.2% on a seasonally adjusted basis in August, the same increase as in July. Over the last 12 months, the all-items index increased just 2.5% before seasonal adjustment.

It also may make little difference to voters that presidents don’t control inflation and can only modestly influence it. Reining in price hikes is the province of the independent Federal Reserve, which is poised to lower interest rates for the first time in four years because of recent progress on the price front. The rollback could make housing and other things more affordable for many, though not for a while yet.

Despite that, of course, Trump has trumpeted inflation as a reason Americans should elect him. He knows all too well that a price spiral has cost incumbent presidents — notably Carter and Gerald Ford — the White House. It helped Reagan to get in, too, so Trump understandably figures it could be a winning issue for him.

What’s more, real incomes haven’t been growing much. As polls expert Nate Silver writes, real disposable personal income, basically how much money people have left after taxes and inflation, is historically one of the best predictors of election outcomes. And it’s been flat during Biden’s tenure: people’s incomes aren’t growing much. Part of that, he notes, was due to spikes caused by COVID stimulus spending — but even over the past year, it’s barely kept up with population growth:

But to maintain that things haven’t been getting better economically — overall — is simply false. If one looks at gross domestic product, for instance, the trend line has been markedly up:

And unemployment rates reflect gains, too. Recall that Trump’s term was marked by a Covid-induced recession that lasted from February to April 2020 (hardly the sort of thing one can look back on fondly). After Trump left the Biden-Harris team a jobless rate of 6.4% in January 2021, the climb back economically challenged the Democrats. It took the labor market a bit less than two years to recover to pre-recession levels. Now, we’re just above historic lows in joblessness, with a 4.2% national rate.

Moreover, one’s feeling of well-being has a lot to do with housing costs and prices. And for homeowners, times could scarcely be better, at least insofar as their wealth is tied to the value of their homes (the story is different, of course, for renters and would-be home buyers):

To point to just one example, the home of my relatives in suburban Jackson, New Jersey, is now worth $570,000, a good bit more than the $120,000 they paid in 1990 (and that $120K equals $296,500 today, so they’ve had dramatic inflation-adjusted gains), according to Redfin. By that measure alone, they are much better off than in the past.

But much of that data above is backward looking. At the moment, it seems, many consumers are hardly feeling impoverished, and some are beginning to believe Harris would be a better choice than Trump on the economic front.

“Consumer sentiment was essentially unchanged for the fourth consecutive month, inching up 1.4 index points,” the director of the much-watched University of Michigan consumer survey reported in an early assessment of August survey results. “With election developments dominating headlines … sentiment for Democrats climbed 6% in the wake of Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee for president. For Republicans, sentiment moved in the opposite direction, falling 5% … Sentiment of Independents, who remain in the middle, rose 3%.”

“The survey shows that 41% of consumers believe that Harris is the better candidate for the economy, while 38% chose Trump,” survey director Joanne Hsu writes. “Overall, expectations strengthened for both personal finances and the five-year economic outlook, which reached its highest reading in four months….”

Of course, big-picture facts may matter little to folks who are convinced the past was better. Indeed, with its Make America Great Again theme, the Trump candidacy is based on a rosy view of the past, one that under scrutiny seems beyond saccharine and, for many Americans, is just inaccurate. His negativism, with comments such as “we are a nation in decline,” play well with some, but will they with most?

To be sure, there is plenty of reason to be concerned about various social pathologies in the United States — school shootings come to mind first and foremost. Despite my libertarian friend’s view that racism and sexism are well back in the country’s rear-view mirror, moreover, many Americans are concerned about such ingrained traits in our national psyche — even if we have had progress there.

“Voters overall have mixed views of the impact of Harris’ gender and race and ethnicity on her candidacy,” a recent report by the Pew Research Center finds. “More say the fact that Harris is a woman and that she is Black and Asian will help her than hurt her with voters this fall. Somewhat more voters see Harris’ gender as a potential negative (30%) than see her race and ethnicity this way (19%).”

“Harris supporters are far more likely than Trump supporters to say the vice president’s gender and race will be a liability,” the report continues. “More than twice as many Harris supporters (42%) as Trump supporters (16%) say the fact that Harris is a woman will hurt her with voters. Fewer Harris supporters think her race and ethnicity will be a hindrance (31%), but just 8% of Trump supporters say the same.”

With comments such as “she happened to turn Black,” Trump is doing his best to rouse the racists among his devotees while trying to undercut Harris’s support among Blacks. Certainly, Trump doesn’t seem to be succeeding in the latter regard, with some 82% of Black voters “definitely” or “probably” in her corner, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

In the end, to the extent that Harris can get people to focus on facts, she may even persuade some that things have been getting better, Trump’s incessant focus on the negative notwithstanding. And there’s a decent shot things will get even better going forward. Focusing on a sunny future — America as a “shining city on the hill” — helped Reagan. Might that work for Harris, too?

“Me, debate again? You crazy?”

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump can’t afford another disaster, but the first may make little difference

Of course, he won’t debate her a second time.

For the benefit of his followers and his ego, Donald J. Trump declared that he bested Kamala Harris in a debate that even conservatives – smart ones anyway – declared was a hands-down disaster for him.

“Kamala Harris baited Trump with surgical precision, triggering his insecurities — about his crowd sizes, his wealth, his racism, his criminal record — while giving him full scope to wallow in his delusions. In the 90-minute debate, she exposed Donald Trump and broke him,” Charlie Sykes wrote on Substack. “Trump was undisciplined, unprepared, and easily goaded into his signature tantrums of grievance, which were as incoherent as they were divorced from reality … Tens of millions of voters watched a live reality television show in which a bitter, confused, and diminished old man was falling apart in front of their eyes.”

Another conservative, David Frum, weighed in in The Atlantic: “He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backwards-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible. Harris hit pain point after pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch.”

Certainly, much of the public appeared to agree that Vice-President Harris mopped the floor with Trump. Shortly after the Sept. 10 fracas, a CNN poll showed Harris winning 63% to 37% among debate-watchers and a YouGov poll showed her winning 54% to 31% among registered voters who watched at least some of the melee, with 14% unsure, according to The Washington Post.

So, with his animalistic smarts, Trump is wise to avoid a second debate. How could he possibly want a second round of his angry squinting, venting and waxing irrational and conspiratorial? By contrast, when he controls the stage and speaks to true believers in his rallies, he’s the master of his own domain (reference intentional), the TV-savvy demagogue who can appear slick and poised (despite many slips).

For Harris backers, however, the problem is that the debate may not have moved the needle much with the few undecided folks out there. The latest polls barely budged, with Harris ahead of Trump by just 2.8 points, at 47.1% to Trump’s 44.3%.

Despite Harris’s national lead, the model that polls expert Nate Silver uses still gives Trump a higher chance of winning the necessary 270 Electoral College votes in November, as Newsweek reported. It shows Trump taking the critical battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina. The other swing states, Wisconsin and Michigan, are a toss-up.

How can this be? How can such an inarticulate boor, a proven criminal and business and political failure, still have the slightest bit of credibility? After his disastrous performance, how can his party still rally around him, unlike the Democrats and President Biden?

The answer is complicated. But I suggest it starts, paradoxically, with the fact that Harris won the debate. In her triumph, she is many things that Trump’s followers can’t abide: smart, young, female and Black.

On the smart point, Trump has long been popular with undereducated voters. In 2016, only 29% of Trump voters had college degrees, compared with 43% of Hillary Clinton’s voters. And while non-college whites made up a majority of Trump’s voters (63%), they constituted only about a quarter of Clinton’s (26%). As Trump famously said after winning a Nevada primary in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.”

Did many of them even watch the debate? Some 67.1 million Americans tuned in, more than the 53.1 million who watched Biden self-destruct in the June 27 faceoff with Trump, but less than the 73 million who watched the first Trump-Biden match in 2020 and far less than the 84 million who watched Clinton and Trump battle the first time in 2016.

And let’s remember that Clinton was widely pronounced the winner in her three debates with Trump back then. Only some 32% of those polled pronounced him the winner in his best performance in the second debate. Just 24% judged him favorably in his first outing with Clinton.

With both Clinton and Harris, I submit, the fact that both women ran circles around Trump intellectually was a negative with much of the undereducated electorate. Recall that such folks likely spent much of their time in school resenting the smart kids, so they likely would give Clinton and Harris little credit for their debating savvy.

Second, Harris at 59 is relatively young, especially compared with the 78-year-old Trump. Middle-aged voters tend to support Trump, while those over 65 are split evenly, and are up for grabs. Thus, we see Harris pounding away on the Biden Administration’s efforts to cut insulin costs, its moves to let Medicare negotiate with drugmakers and its $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket drug costs. We also see Trump’s plan to exempt Social Security payments from income taxes.

A lot of the older folks turned away from President Biden after his debate debacle. Will the Trumpers among them do so now after the former president’s poor performance? Will they see the signs of cognitive decline that have long been evident to mental health professionals?

Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman, source: Weill Cornell Medical College

“If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” Weill Cornell Medical College professor and psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic. “A condition such as vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease would not be out of the ordinary for a 78-year-old.”

Still, let’s not forget the potent impact of identity politics. For all her brilliance, her achievements and her skills, Harris is female and Black, guaranteeing an uphill fight. According to the latest Pew Research Center polling, most Harris supporters say Trump’s race will help him (59%), as will his being male (56%). Most Trump supporters, by contrast, say the former president’s race and gender will not make much of difference (66% say this about Trump’s race, 61% say the same of his gender), but the latter numbers are hardly encouraging in a tight race.

Another element in Trump’s favor is the weariness many voters feel about the race, a sentiment the non-stop headline-grabbing nonsense and divisiveness from Trump has fueled. Some Trump supporters in my family, for instance, are just tired of it all and want the election behind them. They don’t want to hear criticisms of their golden boy, no matter how valid. As Harris has noted, even Trump rally-goers drift out of his gatherings early out of exhaustion and boredom.

Finally, there’s the matter of faulty memories. Despite such evidence as the Covid-induced rise in unemployment to 14.8% in 2020 and the 6.4% rate Trump left to Biden, Trump claims his tenure produced the greatest economy in the history of the world. That is simply false, and yet his repetition of the claim appears to have lulled Trumpers into believing it.

“In the U.S., average annual GDP growth during the past eight years has been almost constant in real terms, except for the Covid period (2020 and 2021): 2.6% in 2017-2019 and 2.3% since 2022,” economist Enrico Colombatto wrote in August.

When Biden took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4%, Colombatto added. The rate gradually declined to the low of 3.4% in early 2023 before climbing to 4.2% under an inflation-fighting economic slowdown engineered by the high interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

Let’s recall, moreover, that presidents can influence economies but they don’t control them. The Fed has far more to do with inflation – admittedly very high under Biden – than a president does. And lately it appears that the Fed will move to lower interest rates.

Back in 2016, Trump’s demagoguery and stagey anger proved remarkably effective. But is the sequel playing badly now? It’s possible that Harris’s efforts to paint an optimistic future, with programs to help housing get on track and tax credits for parents of young children – “the opportunity economy,” as she calls it – will sell better than Trump’s rage. So, too, may her plans for reviving a border-fixing bill that Trump quashed early this year so he could run on that troubling issue.

Nonetheless, given all the possible pitfalls in coming weeks and the shortcomings of polling, it would seem the election remains either candidate’s to win. It may prove to be a matter of voter turnout, which could rest on which candidate can generate more enthusiasm. It may be a matter of knocking on doors, the key for Barack Obama’s victories. So far, Trump’s “ground game” seems weak, as he relies on rallies and headlines.

Certainly, Democrats have been winning the dynamism race ever since Biden yielded to Harris. Can Harris sustain that? Can she convince voters that the exhausting politics of division and the chaos that Trump tends to sow are better left behind rather than repeated for another four years? The questions remain open.

Taking his marbles and going home

Posted on September 9, 2024 by Joe Weber

A Brown trustee’s resignation doesn’t help the fight against antisemitism

Brown students discuss divestment; source: Brown Daily Herald

Hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman has made a lot of good decisions in his career. Forbes pegs his net worth at $2.5 billion.

But this week he made a bad choice with respect to Brown University, where he served as a trustee from 2019 until now. He quit the board, angry that it will hold a vote on whether the school should divest itself of securities related to Israel.

Brown President Christina H. Paxson agreed last April 30 to consider divestment after anti-Israel protests erupted at the school, as they did on many campuses.

“I find it morally reprehensible that holding a divestment vote was even considered, much less that it will be held—especially in the wake of the deadliest assault on the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Edelman wrote in a Sept. 8 Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The university leadership has for some reason chosen to reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown.”

He added: “I consider the willingness to hold this vote a stunning failure of moral leadership at Brown University. I am unwilling to lend my name or give my time to a body that lacks basic moral judgment.”

Edelman’s stance, in my view, is principled, understandable and wrong.

There should be a trustee vote, as is expected on Oct. 17-18; fittingly, that is within two weeks of the anniversary of Hamas’s animalistic savagery in Israel. And that vote should be preceded by a full-throated, campus-wide discussion of the issues involved. After all, isn’t education all about discussing the big things?

And aren’t the 120 or so Brown students who set up an encampment to protest the war in Gaza last spring sorely in need of education, in dire need of learning some big things? Shouldn’t those who are pressing anew for divestment be taught why the idea is so damn wrong?

That discussion, if it occurs, needs to be based on facts. It should begin, for instance, with some history about Israel and Jews:

For starters, the discussion should explore how long Jews have been in the land. The oldest Hebrew text ever found was discovered at the ancient Israelite settlement, near modern-day Beit Shemesh, that dates to between 1050 and 970 BCE. The academic consensus, based on archeological and other evidence, is that a United Kingdom of Israel existed in the 10th and 9th centuries BCE.

Of course, Jews moved in and out of what is now Israel over many centuries since then. Exiles followed the two destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem, in 586 BCE by the Babylonians and in 70 CE, when the Romans sacked the place. But, even through those events, Jews remained, keeping a consistent presence, as scholars have long noted.

As Cornell University Prof. Barry Strauss has written, for instance, in a piece detailing that continuous presence: “To sum up, the Jews have an ancient history in Palestine going back three thousand years. Their yearning for Zion goes back well more than two thousand years. Jews are indigenous to Palestine.”

So, in other words, the oft-shouted argument that Israel is a colonial project is hogwash. Brown students and many others need to learn that.

Second, the discussion should deal with the number of times Arabs have refused deals that could have settled the century-long fighting between them and Jews in the region. Palestinian rejectionism dates back at least to 1937, when the Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin Husseini suggested to the British that Jews should be deported. He went so far as to make his case against the Jews with a soulmate, Adolf Hitler, in 1941:

The Grand Mufti and Hitler in 1941; source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1987-004-09A / Heinrich Hoffmann, CC BY-SA

A few years later, the Jerusalem Arab leader rejected a UN partition plan to create two states. A long string of Palestinian leaders has echoed that rejection of various deals since. Their intransigence gave rise to the often-noted comment by Israeli diplomat Abba Eban in 1973: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Hamas, of course, has squandered many opportunities. Among others, in its effort to build tunnels and its war machine, it blew the chance to turn Gaza into something like a Singapore on the Mediterranean over the last couple decades. Instead of using millions of global aid dollars to develop an economy, it created a subterranean fortress, and it repeated its rejectionism of coexistence publicly as recently as 2017:

“Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras al-Naqurah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit,” Hamas asserted. “It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.”

Hamas at that point declared null and void the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate Document, the UN Palestine Partition Resolution “and whatever resolutions and measures that derive from them or are similar to them.” It rejected the Oslo Accords, signed by the PLO in 1993 and 1995.

Third, turning to current issues, the discussion should detail how rape and savagery were the means that Hamas used on Oct. 7^th to kill some 1,200 Jews, as verified by the United Nations, among others. The discussion should include video evidence of those crimes that students should be required to watch. They should appreciate the monstrousness of the group some of them are championing, should understand what the popular “by any means necessary” placards really mean.

The discussion should include details about the more than 240 hostages the group took, many of whom are now dead. Some, of course, were wantonly slaughtered recently, within days of rescue. It should address how Hamas released videos of the murdered afterward in bids to torment their families and pressure Israel into a bad deal that would assure Hamas’s rearmament and continued existence.

Fourth, it should include information about how in Israel Muslims are free to pray on the Temple Mount, how Arabs in the country have the right to vote and have elected representatives, and about how the charge of “apartheid” falls apart in the face of such rights and the peaceful coexistence of Israelis of many colors and religions in the land.

Yes, the discussion should also explore the areas where Israel has fallen short. Its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and other areas needs to be examined, as does the country’s right-wing settler policies. Many of those are opposed by Israelis, though Palestinians in the territories hardly help their cause by allying with Hamas. The state isn’t perfect and its problems need to be fully aired, as well.

But there’s no excuse for the ignorance that gives prominence to those problems and not to other more compelling realities. For instance, the discussion should elaborate on the meaning of the oft-chanted phrase “from the river to the sea.” The slogan refers, of course, to purging the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean of Jews and replacing them with Muslims, as described in the Hamas documents; that would be a real genocide.

Once that sort of discussion takes place at Brown, there should be a vote on divestment. The trustees, of course, should oppose it unanimously.

If most of Brown’s 38 trustees vote otherwise, Edelman might then have been morally obligated to quit – as other dissenting trustees might then be, as well. But they would have had the chance to make their case based on the points above. And they could then feel assured that the antisemites simply outnumber sensible people at the school — a sign that, maybe, sensible folks of any persuasion or creed should avoid Brown for good.

Taking one’s marbles and going home before the game is done, however, doesn’t solve the problems of antisemitism, nor does it remedy the historical and political ignorance that plague many American campuses, especially the elite ones. Academics at schools such as Brown should know better than to propagate the ahistorical anti-Zionist nonsense that too many students appear to be swallowing.

And, if they don’t, trustees and administrators need to install academics who do.

Universities exist to educate. As proven in last year’s national turmoil, they need to do a far better job of that. In their ignorance, students last year broke university rules at Brown, albeit for a relatively short time (less than a week). One idea is that during this term, those students should be required to take and pass coursework that explores the matters raised above, taught by professors who do know their stuff.

As for trustees and administrators, their job is fix the problems. Unless Edelman was pretty sure the problems are irreparable at Brown, he should have stuck around and cast his vote. It would have helped.

The Philadelphi Corridor

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Joe Weber

Can we ever have peace if Hamas can rearm?

From top left: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi; from bottom left, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Carmel Gat. Source: The Hostages Families Forum via AP/Times of Israel

We know them by a few bare facts. We know them by photos, snapshots that reflected their warmth, their enthusiasm for life. We know them by headlines that flew across the world. We know them by the grief that engulfed anyone with simple human feelings, Jews and non-Jews alike.

They were: Carmel Gat, 40, a yoga instructor who helped other hostages cope with nearly 11 months of imprisonment by practicing her craft with them; Alex Lobanov, 32, who left behind two children, one born while he was held captive; Ori Danino, 25, who escaped the Nova music festival, but returned to help save others and was captured.

Also, Almog Sarusi, 27, who attended the festival with his girlfriend whom terrorists murdered there; Eden Yerushalmi, 24, who attended the festival with friends; and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, an American-Israeli citizen who lost part of an arm in the assault, and whose parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention and met with the president and the pope.

These six hostages were among more than 240 taken by Hamas and its allies nearly a year ago, on Oct. 7th. They were kept in tunnels by terrorists committed to killing Jews like them. And those terrorists did just that with these six, shooting them multiple times at close range between only days before their likely rescue by Israeli soldiers.

Part of “the Gaza metro;” source: The New York Times

Then, of course, the murderers slunk off like cowards, no doubt hoping to kill again. Recall that their job, as Hamas fighters, is not to respect life, but to take it, brutally, if possible. Their job — and their hope, if they’ve imbibed all the pabulum that their perverse grasp of Islam tells them — is to be martyrs, though not when it would require actually facing their armed enemies.

They are much better at killing unarmed innocents, much like those who commit suicide bombings.

Hamas’s leaders have taught their legions that Jews must be eliminated from the land, that is their religious duty to purge them. As Hamas declared in its “Covenant” of 1988, “Resisting and quelling the enemy become the individual duty of every Muslim, male or female.” It also declared: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

In 2017, Hamas restated and reaffirmed its principles. Among them: “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.”

The documents pound home four themes, as explained by Georgetown University Prof. Bruce Hoffman:

— The complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia),

— The need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective,

— The deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land, and

— The reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories.

For years leading up to Oct. 7th, moreover, the leaders of Hamas have steeped their devotees — and their families for that matter — in hatred. They have idealized “the virtue of death-for-Allah,” as counterterrorism expert Matthew Levitt put it in a talk 17 years ago.

Levitt told of a suicide bomber’s mother who instilled in her son the desire for martyrdom and “brought them [her sons] up to become martyrs, to be martyrs for the name of Allah.” Her “martyred” son Muhammad’s old bedroom was adorned with posters of “martyred” Palestinians. The mother, the late Miriam Farhat, was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council on the Hamas ticket in January 2006. She claimed to be proud that three of her sons were killed in attacks on Israelis.

And yet many say Israel must seek a deal with such leaders. The country must agree to a ceasefire or other hostages — perhaps more than 60 still alive — will be murdered, as the six were. Israelis by the thousands have marched in protest of their government’s refusal — or inability — to make a deal for their release. Nonetheless, nearly three-quarters of Jewish Israelis think a deal is unlikely, according to an August survey by the Israel Democracy Institute.

But can or should Israelis deal with the terrorists? Can they deal with people who refuse even after 76 years to recognize the “Zionist entity,” who insist that “no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts,” who reject “any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”?

Yes, Hamas has traded some of the more than 240 hostages it took for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. About 109 were released as of the end of last November, as The Wall Street Journal reported. But another 70 died that day or since (in addition to the 1,200 killed in Israel), and Israeli officials believe 34 or more are dead. This leaves about 60 who may be alive in captivity.

In theory, Israel could trade more prisoners for the remaining hostages and the bodies of those being kept. But, so far, neither side has accepted terms that have been floated for such a trade — and it’s hard to see how the gulf can be bridged.

As suggested by the United States, the terms include a permanent end to hostilities and removal of Israeli troops from in or near Gaza. Hamas, for its part, has rejected any Israeli presence in the so-called Philadelphi corridor, an 8.7-mile strip of land on the Gaza-Egypt border, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will not leave the corridor free for Hamas. To him, the tunnel-pocked corridor is a transit point for Hamas to rearm.

For his part, Netanyahu has been unmovable on the point that Hamas must be eliminated. In a recent speech, the prime minister repeated that Israel’s war goals are “to destroy Hamas, to bring back all of our hostages, to ensure that Gaza will no longer present a threat to Israel, and to safely return the residents of the northern border.” He also said “three of those war goals go through one place: the Philadelphi Corridor. That is Hamas’s pipeline for oxygen and rearmament.”

Is it unreasonable for Israel to insist that Hamas, an implacable foe that will never accept coexistence, must be destroyed? Can the group ever be trusted to not resume its fight, should a ceasefire be reached? Can a group that wantonly executes six innocents in cold blood — not to mention 1,200 earlier — really be trusted to live up to any commitments?

Hamas’s network of tunnels, some hundreds of miles long, allows terrorists such as the murderers of the six to escape and hide. Israel in mid-August destroyed some 50 such tunnels in a single week, some in the Philadelphi Corridor. Won’t the Hamas fighters just hold out in that network until they can emerge anew and threaten Israel? Will the group ever accept its own demise in a negotiated deal?

In theory, Israel could get back at least some of the hostages by agreeing to those terms and then, after a time, it could return to fight anew with Hamas. That would, of course, spare the lives of however many hostages could be released. But as Hamas trickled out those captives — and, no doubt, it would do so over months, if not years — it would rearm and Israel would be back in Gaza, fighting anew again. Moreover, little could prevent Hamas from trying to capture more hostages.

As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens put it in a piece headlined “A Hostage Deal is a Poison Pill for Israel”: “Whatever one thinks of Netanyahu, the weight of outrage should fall not on him but on Hamas. It released a video of a hostage it later murdered — 24-year-old Eden Yerushalmi, telling her family how much she loved them — on Monday, the day after her funeral. It’s another act of cynical, grotesque and unadulterated sadism by the group that pretends to speak in the name of all Palestinians. It does not deserve a cease-fire so that it can regain its strength. It deserves the same ash heap of history on which, in our better moments, we deposited the Nazis, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.”

Israel faces a classic Hobson’s Choice. There really is only one way to proceed, and that is to render Hamas incapable of ever attacking again.

The larger question, though, is what vanquishing Hamas would look like. Certainly, it would involve the death of the murderous leader, Yahya Sinwar, and his top ranks — with or without trial. But would it also involve thousands of fighters parading out of tunnels with white flags, renouncing the group they dedicated their lives to? Would that really happen, given their passion for martyrdom?

We may lack adequate models here. For Hamas to be defeated, its soldiers must be permanently disarmed or killed, but more that than, its ideals must be shattered. Gazans and Palestinians in general would have to renounce its aims and methods, much as Germans did with Nazism after World War II.

As many as 8.8 million Germans died in that war, including perhaps 3.27 million civilians, in a total population of 80 million. The population was subsequently impoverished, the German economy crushed. Will proportionately similar numbers of Gazans have to die for Hamas’s philosophy to be eradicated?

It seems like a monstrous idea. Some 2.3 million people live in Gaza, and 10% of them equals 230,000 people, men, women and children. Must that ghastly number be reached? As decent human beings, we must hope not.

And would it really change hearts and minds, much as German attitudes changed after the war? Would the economic rebuilding envisioned by the U.S. plan, in conjunction with Gaza’s Arab neighbors, give people hope, much as the Marshall Plan famously did for Germans? Can we root out the pernicious ideals that people like Farhat espoused, and how can we do so?

Tragically for the Palestinian people, thousands have died already in Gaza. They are also victims of Hamas. How long will it take for those who survive to realize that, even if the weapons that wreaked those horrors were Israeli? How many more must die for the survivors to put the blame where it belongs? Will we see the day when Palestinians disgusted by Hamas lead Israeli soldiers to the group’s redoubts, turning them in in hopes of achieving peace?

There are straws in the wind that suggest progress. A Palestinian on the West Bank, for instance, wrote a letter published by The Free Press.

“ For me, all lives are sacred,” he wrote. “I cried for Hersh and the other hostages just as deeply as I do for innocent Palestinians whose lives have been destroyed by this war. That some people react to the deaths of hostages with celebration or satisfaction is simply beyond my comprehension. It’s something I can’t digest or accept. But I also know how it happens: Kids here are taught from an early age to hate Israelis, to view them as enemies, as occupiers who shouldn’t be anywhere in this land. They live their entire lives with this hate and do not know anything else. I was lucky to have experiences in my life with Jews and Israelis that gave me a radically different understanding.

“I can’t speak for my people any more than a single Israeli can speak for all of you, but still I feel compelled to say: I’m sorry. Please accept my sincere apologies. I regret that we have failed you. I regret that my people have failed you. I may be just one voice but it’s important for me to say as a Palestinian, I mourn with you and stand by your side.”

Soon, the Jewish holidays will be upon us. People will pray for peace. For my part, I will pray for the destruction of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their ilk, as well as for peace. Can one have the latter without the former? The morally repulsive killings of the six hostages — and so many others — argues for nothing less.

The sacred and the profane

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Joe Weber

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to know the differencE

For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, soldiers from the 3^rd U.S. Infantry Regiment stand guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Every hour or every half hour, depending on the season, the guard is changed in an elaborate ceremony.

Along with the reverential hush that marks the resting places at Arlington of more than 400,000 veterans and their dependents, this is one of the ways America acknowledges an unpayable debt to those lost in every war the country has fought. Each Memorial Day, presidents lay wreaths at the unknown soldiers’s tomb as members of the military stand watch.

The watchwords in this hallowed place are somber, reflective and sober.

So, how is it that Donald J. Trump could show up at the cemetery, grinning and sporting a thumbs-up sign over a grave with rows of graves behind him? How is that he could release a campaign TikTok video of his visit, exploiting the tragedy of American military deaths in Afghanistan in a bid to embarrass Kamala Harris?

It is, of course, illegal for candidates to use this cemetery as a campaign prop. A staffer made that clear to the Trump team, only to be shoved aside and later to have her mental health questioned. The U.S. Army quickly defended the staffer, reminding everyone in an unusual rebuke to Trump that “federal laws, Army regulations and DOD policies … clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.”

The Army added that the cemetery “is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve,”

But, even if it weren’t illegal, wouldn’t simple civility, a sense of decorum and respect for the dead keep a former president from behaving so badly, even if he is desperate to halt his slide in the polls. Wouldn’t a modest amount of good taste prevent him from marketing himself on the graves of the fallen?

Really, how low can the man and his team sink?

Indeed, not only are Trump and his team plumbing new depths, but they do so ignorantly. A top campaign adviser, criticizing the staffer who was pushed aside by a pair of Trump staff bullies, didn’t even grasp the difference between “hollowed” and “hallowed” in a statement he issued.

“For a despicable individual to physically prevent President Trump’s team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hollowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery,” the adviser said in a written statement provided to The Associated Press, as reported by the Military Times. He insisted that the ex-president and his team “conducted themselves with the utmost respect and dignity.”

Really, are grinning and offering a thumbs-up over a soldier’s grave dignifying and respectful? Perhaps in Trump World, but in any other realm?

Digging in, a top Trump campaign aide later attacked the Army for its rebuke of Trump. He wrote on X: “Reposting this hoping to trigger the hacks at @SecArmy.” He tagged the account used by Army Secretary Christine E. Wormuth in what The Washington Post called an apparent bid to escalate the Trump campaign’s feud with the Pentagon.

Not surprisingly, Trump appears to have made few friends among veterans with his action. “What kind of creep uses a national military cemetery to film a political hit ad?,” the group Veterans for Responsible Leadership asked. It said he violated both the “sanctity of Arlington” as well as the “code of conduct for national military cemeteries.”

“Trump only cares about the fallen when he can exploit their sacrifice for his own gain,” the progressive organization VoteVets said, as reported by the Daily Beast and yahoo!news. “To him, they’re just ‘suckers and losers.’ He’s proven time and again that respect and honor mean nothing to him.”

The reference to “suckers” and “losers,” of course, is to terms Trump, as president, used in referring to American soldiers killed in combat, as The New York Times reported. Last year, John F. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a former Marine Corps general, confirmed reporting that Trump had used the words.

The context is noteworthy. On a trip to France in 2018, Trump declined a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where more than 2,200 U.S. service members are buried, as noted by a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, Brandon Friedman. “Why should I go to that cemetery?” Trump asked staff members. “It’s filled with losers.” It was in another conversation on the same trip that Trump called Marines who died at Belleau Wood, a major WWI battle site, “suckers” for getting killed.

Denying the reporting at the time, Trump also lashed out at Kelly, calling him “one of the dumbest people” he’d ever met. Of course, that hadn’t prevented him from having Kelly serve as his staff chief for 17 months and earlier as his Secretary of Homeland Security. Before that, Kelly was commander of the U.S. Southern Command. Kelly’s son, Robert, was killed in Afghanistan in 2010 and is buried at Arlington.

Others panned Trump’s vulgar grandstanding, as well.

Former Rep. Max Rose (D-NY), who serves as an adviser for the VoteVets group, condemned the events as “sick and tragic.” And Retired Maj. General Paul Eaton, another VoteVets adviser, told USA Today he “truly cannot think of something more repugnant than starting a political fracas on land where Gold Star families mourn. Someone who would do that should never be Commander in Chief.”

But Trump is consistent. He has a long history of demeaning military people. He belittled the parents of a slain Muslim soldier who had spoken at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, as the Times reported. The next year, he told the widow of a soldier killed in Niger that her husband “knew what he signed up for.” In 2020, he speculated that veterans and their families visiting the White House had infected him with the coronavirus.

Early in his 2016 campaign, Trump suggested that a critic, former GOP presidential candidate John McCain, was not a war hero because he had been shot down over Vietnam and had become a prisoner of war. (“I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said.) Trump received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War — one for a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that led to a medical exemption, as the paper reported.

Trump also labeled as a “moron” retired U.S. Army General Mark A. Milley, a Princeton graduate and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This came after Milley said in an address at a military base: “We don’t take an oath a king or queen or a tyrant or dictator. We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution.”

Milley had told The Atlantic that when he invited a wounded, wheelchair-bound soldier to sing “God Bless America” at his 2019 welcoming ceremony as the Joint Chiefs chairman, Trump admonished him. “Why do you bring people like that here?” Trump asked, as noted by the former Army infantry officer, Friedman. “No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

More recently, Trump said that the Medal of Freedom, a civilian award he’d given to a Republican donor, was “much better” than the military Medal of Honor. Trump said that’s because Medal of Honor recipients are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead.”

As Friedman argued in a commentary for MSNBC: “These are not one-off statements by a rhetorically reckless buffoon. This man harbors deep resentment toward the military and those who’ve sacrificed in service. Even when he poses with a family — as he did at Arlington this week — he only does so to enhance his campaign or his political prospects. Trump’s use for the military and our dead extends only as far as it suits him.”

The former president is, of course, chiefly a marketer, a real-estate huckster, and he has previously not shrunk from using sacred symbols to sell himself. In mid-2020, he posed holding a Bible in front of a Washington church, displaying it for the cameras (including holding it upside-down at times). Known as the Church of the Presidents because many have attended there, the church had been damaged in demonstrations against police brutality and had been boarded up. Trump’s photo-op was designed to counter the protestors.

Perhaps as a result of decades of manipulating the press, Trump may be relishing the attention the Arlington visit has garnered. He may believe, as P.T. Barnum is often reported as saying, that any publicity is good publicity. Indeed, he’s certainly not backing away from his campaign’s use of the cemetery as a prop and has touted supportive comments by members of deceased soldiers’s families.

Now, will most Americans see his stunt for the self-aggrandizing shameful display it was? Trump is exceptionally skilled at bending reality in ways his diehard backers seem to enjoy. Will even some of them blanch at this episode, though? If many don’t, that may be a sorry statement not only about Trump, but about how low some Americans have slipped in the Trump era.

Tom Lehrer got it right

Posted on August 30, 2024 by Joe Weber

But will Kamala Harris show how all that can be overcome?

“Oh, the white folks hate the black folks
And the black folks hate the white folks
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule …

“Oh, the poor folks hate the rich folks
And the rich folks hate the poor folks
All of my folks hate all of your folks
It’s American as apple pie”

Tom Lehrer, Copenhagen 1967, source: PBS

In the mid-1960s, the brilliant Tom Lehrer wrote “National Brotherhood Week,” his insightful riff on the hypocrisy about race in America. How can it be that nearly 60 years later, the satirical lyrics above still speak to us?

And yet they do. Race remains our country’s unfinished business, and reminders of it abound — sometimes in peculiar ways.

Take, for instance, Kamala Harris’s refusal to be drawn into a discussion of race in her conversation with CNN’s Dana Bash. The anchor asked about Donald J. Trump’s bizarre claim that Harris had only recently “happened to turn Black.”

Harris’s response was terse: “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.”

Of course, she was declining to rise to the bait Trump had set out for her. By getting her to focus on race, he hopes to carve off voters who might take exception to such an emphasis. Instead, Harris wants people to focus on her ample professional strengths and by implication to see Trump’s yawning depth of shortcomings.

Harris is a former prosecutor, state attorney general, senator and vice president. Trump’s resume, though it includes the title “president,” is far thinner and includes the titles “felon” and “failed businessman.”

Harris’s approach was entirely reasonable. A short interview on TV is not the best forum for a discussion of race, much less one during a heated presidential campaign. And voters should see her, first and foremost, for her professional qualifications.

But that doesn’t mean that we as a country are not in sad need of such discussions.

Indeed, aside from Trump’s foul bid to inject the issue into this campaign, racial matters have flared up in prior presidential contests. Recall Trump’s “birtherism” efforts against Barack Obama. Some astute observers say the 2016 election of Trump, in fact, was a predictable reaction to the two prior elections of President Obama.

“There were so many Black journalists who saw exactly what was coming in 2016,” Errin Haines said during a panel discussion at the International Symposium on Online Journalism last May in Austin, Texas.

“I remember after Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the conversation was about the myth that we were finally post-racial in this country, which I knew could not have been further from the truth,” the editor at large for The 19^th said. “A lot of Black people in this country, a lot of Black journalists, understood that, if anything, we were about to be hyper-racial.”

In other words, as relayed by writer James Breiner in a smart discussion of the subject, white voters were going to express their dissatisfaction with having a Black president by choosing his opposite.

“If you know anything about the history of race in this country, there is no racial progress without racial backlash; 2016 was the logical destination after a Barack Obama presidency,” Haines added. “A lot of Black journalists saw it coming.”

Just as slavery remains our nation’s original sin, so our inability to deal with its ongoing effects – our racial polarization – remains an unmet challenge. Some tip-toe around the issue, contending, for instance, that it’s obvious that Harris is Black so there’s no need to discuss that.

Others, such as Republicans who’ve been extraordinarily successful in destroying Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives at universities, would ignore the topic altogether. The Chronicle of Higher Education is monitoring attacks on DEI at 196 colleges in 29 states so far, and they’ve ranged from complete legislatively mandated shutdowns of DEI offices and mergers of such offices with other functions to the elimination of diversity statements in hiring and to simple renamings.

At the campus where I taught for 14 years, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Chancellor Rodney D. Bennett recently marked his first anniversary in the job by announcing he will shut down the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and fire the vice chancellor heading it. He cited his “considerable reflection and a thorough review of both the national landscape and the specific needs of our institution” in ordering the closure.

Of course, what Bennett could have cited was pressure from political overseers such as Gov. Jim Pillen. The move was baked in the cake from the time the university regents hired Bennett, ironically a Black man, from the University of Southern Mississippi.

Pillen, as a regent and gubernatorial candidate in 2021, sought unsuccessfully to ban any curricular use of critical race theory from the campus. And his predecessor and mentor, former Gov. Pete Ricketts, had driven out Bennett’s predecessor, Ronnie D. Green, a white man, over an anti-racism plan UNL adopted.

Nationally, anti-CRT efforts were a warm-up for anti-DEI assaults. As analysts for The Brookings Institution reported, “critical race theory (CRT) has become a new bogeyman for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present.” CRT, a theory dating back to the late 1970s, holds that racism is not merely a matter of individual prejudice, but is embedded in legal systems and policies.

Not surprisingly, Pillen is now happy to see DEI disappear at UNL.

“Although that office should never have been established in the first place, it takes courage for a leader to recognize a mistake and chart a new direction,” Pillen said. “The work of eliminating DEI and critical race theory from our public institutions is not complete with the elimination of one bureaucratic office, though. We must continue the work of keeping our university curriculum, programming and its mission free of discrimination or racial preferences in any form.”

Perhaps hypocritically, that view is a new stance for Pillen, though. He became a convert to the nationwide anti-CRT and anti-DEI effort only in recent years, as the GOP rallied nationwide against such initiatives. As a Nebraska regent in 2018, Pillen had supported the DEI office, voting to hire its vice chancellor.

Does his flip-flop reek just a bit of political opportunism? Well, when the bandwagon is rolling their way, politicians often find it convenient to hop on board.

To be sure, some criticisms of DEI programs have merit. A recent piece by a couple Stanford academics in The New York Times notes that such programs sometimes consist of “online or off-the-shelf trainings that are more suitable for airline safety briefings than exploring the complexities of interracial relations, and ideological workshops that inculcate theories of social justice as if there were no plausible alternatives.”

The Stanford academics, who were appointed to the school’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, were especially troubled about how Jews had been treated in DEI programming. Jewish staff members a few years ago had been assigned to a “whiteness accountability” group, and some later complained that they were shot down when they tried to raise concerns about antisemitism, the academics wrote.

“The former D.E.I. director at a Bay Area community college described D.E.I. as based on the premises ‘that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed,’” they wrote. “She was also told by colleagues and campus leaders that “Jews are ‘white oppressors,’” and her task was to ‘decenter whiteness.’”

As it happens, the program now slated to be axed at UNL includes 27 “learning groups,” places for “students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members to engage in dynamic dialogue, reflection, and offer support to one another.” One such group focuses on antisemitism and Islamophobia on college campuses.

Stanford University, source: the Cultural Landscape Foundation

The Stanford academics don’t call for eliminating DEI programs, but rather providing an alternative to the ones they call “ideological.” They argue that campuses, in fact, need programs that foster a sense of belonging and engagement for students of diverse backgrounds, religious beliefs and political views.

They call for a “pluralistic vision.” This would involve “facilitated conversations among participants with diverse identities, religious beliefs and political ideologies, but without a predetermined list of favored identities or a preconceived framework of power, privilege and oppression.” Students would learn how to tell stories about their own identities, values and experiences, while listening to others, acknowledging differences and looking for commonalities.

Though such dialoguing may not be what DEI opponents have in mind, that seems like a useful approach. In our college DEI efforts, I found the most compelling part was an atiracism book club in which we read interesting work and discussed it. Along the way, we discussed our prejudices and backgrounds, sharing things that wouldn’t have come up in other settings.

Also, I found another prong of DEI efforts on campus useful. I served on hiring committees in which we reviewed candidates for various faculty and administrative posts. Being mindful of the need for a diverse faculty – something that is helpful to students, faculty and staff alike – at times meant giving an edge to qualified minority applicants. That’s not a bad thing in an overwhelmingly white faculty group.

We don’t have many places to discuss race in our society. But, for students and faculty alike, universities should be safe spaces for that. Conversations in them can break down walls and educate us. Education, after all, is what universities are about.

Whether folks in the GOP believe it or not, we don’t live in a “post-racial” society. We are not color-blind and, in some respects, should not be, at least not if we want to assure diversity in our schools and workplaces.

Indeed, that diversity is in grave danger in some places now. Declines in Black new-student enrollment at such schools as MIT, Amherst, Tufts and the University of Virginia — perhaps a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in admissions — may just be straws in the wind. Or they could portend problems for minority social mobility and opportunity.

As for the coming election, Harris is wise to stay clear of the topic now. Let her appearance and, for that matter, her gender, speak for themselves. Despite, the racist bait Trump is tossing out, she should stay well clear of his bottom-fishing.

Harris, of course, is eminently qualified for another four years in the White House, this time behind the Resolute Desk. Her multi-racial background and gender should be pluses and, to thoughtful and reasonable voters, they will be. Will there be enough such voters? November 5 will tell.

Will voters prove to be stubborn again?

Posted on August 25, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump’s moral and ethical baggage makes for a heavy loaD

As I noted in two recent installments of The Big Picture, I have a sibling who supported Donald J. Trump in 2016 and who appears to be doing so again this year. In a family chat, she listed a clutch of issues that she suggested disqualify Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Feel free to find discussions of the key issues here and here.

Today, let’s take up another tidbit my sister mentioned. She contended that my two brothers and I don’t “like” Trump.

I don’t entirely dispute this, though the word is an odd one. How can one like a fellow one sees only on TV or in images in news accounts? Indeed, with someone such as Trump, can one be sure we’re not seeing a made-up persona, a manufactured cutout created on a bad TV reality show? That’s the way many American voters of a certain age probably got to “know” and “like” him to begin with.

Who is the real Trump? There is reason to believe, I suggest, that the angry man who vents at length when he goes off-piste, ignoring his Teleprompter, is the real one.

This is the one, you’ll recall, who mocked disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, the one who questioned Harris’s racial identity, the one who extolled “good genes” in much the same way some Germans did before WWII, the one who said he would be a dictator for a day, and the one who referred to his supporters as “basement dwellers.” This Trump was also the one who famously called insurrectionists “great patriots,” said he would pardon them, and said “for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

I suggest that this is the Trump who seems most animated when indulging his odd sense of grievance, vengeance and anger. But how can such things make one likable? In what world is that so? In what realm, one might ask, do Trumpies exist then? What does that say of their character, as well as of Trump’s?

Lately, some Republicans have sought to move Trump away from such things as his personal attacks on Harris and Walz. Many have advised him to drop the puerile name-calling that, maybe, worked for him in 2016; it now seems only to remind independent voters of what they dislike about him. Some folks, such as Wall Street Journal columnist and former GOP presidential speech-writer Peggy Noonan, keep pushing him to focus on policy differences.

That’s a shift that may be essential for Trump. If the race is about character, how could he possibly win?

Let’s recall that Trump is a thrice-married philandering 34-count felon with a costly history of sexual abuse, defamation, business fraud and business failure. Does that sort of personal character stand up against that of a former state attorney general and San Francisco district attorney who put criminals in jail? Does his being a criminal make him “likable,” and what does that say about a person who then “likes” him?

Let me share some personal history, a tidbit not dissimilar to the experiences of other reporters who followed Trump’s career. In the spring of 1992, I spent some time with him for a story for BusinessWeek. First, an editor and I visited him in his New York office. Then I toured one of his then-bankrupt Atlantic City casinos with him.

In the first visit, my editor, the late Chris Welles, and I told Trump we planned to write about his businesses, intending to give readers an update on where things stood, given the bankruptcies of his three gaming houses. He was prominent in New York then and had an emerging national name and we wanted to assess how his diminished business empire was faring. The meeting was a preliminary one, designed to let him know we were setting out to do this piece, and to see if he would talk with us for it.

Recall that Trump then, and now, was a deal maker. His main question was: would this be a cover story? If we could commit to that, it seemed, he might decide one way; if not, another. (As we told him, we had no idea how the piece would be played, as that sort of decision wouldn’t be made in advance and would depend on whatever else was happening that week.) He wanted to know what we would say in the piece. (Of course, we didn’t know that because we had not done the reporting yet.) Would this be favorable? (See the prior question).

The vibe, however, was clear. It was as if we could see the wheels spinning in his head. Trump wanted to manipulate us, to box us into a corner in which he could trade access for good press and a big spread, a cover he could tack on his wall to feed his needy ego. His approach was so calculating, so slippery, and so unlike that of other business folks I had written about that I recall feeling like I needed a bath afterward.

Despite our refusals to play along with his game, he agreed, nonetheless, to give us access. Then, sometime soon after, he and I visited one of his casinos, a trip that was bizarre. First, he brought along his then-paramour, Marla Maples, with whom he had infamously cheated on his first wife, Ivana. Was she there to impress me somehow? Was she a trophy he enjoyed showcasing? No other CEO of my acquaintance trotted out mistresses like show ponies when I did stories on them.

As we walked through the place, gamblers came up to him, oohing and ahhing, and complimenting Marla, who was a lovely ex-model. One dazzled gamer touched Trump with her slots-playing hand for luck. The experience gave me my first hard realization about Trump – the gulf between the financially ruined businessman and his public image even then was as vast as the Grand Canyon. To anyone familiar with his dealings, he was a failure, but to much of the public, he was nearly god-like, very much like the character Hollywood later created in “The Apprentice.”

Indeed, the character many Americans came to know in that most unreal reality TV show may be the one they support. That decisive, hard-nosed figure bears little resemblance, however, to the real man, as many who know him can attest.

In researching the piece, I visited a couple high-priced New York bankers representing his creditors. One, a strait-laced button-down guy, told me flat out “Donald Trump is a lying sack of s—.” His partner, a striking woman, told me Trump was constantly trying to get her onto his plane, but she said she’d rather fly coach than be anywhere close to him. His lechery was unmistakable, she suggested, and he repulsed her.

My colleague, Larry Light, and I, of course, followed the facts as we wrote the piece, (which was not a cover story); his prospects, at least in the short run, seemed good, and we wrote that. Largely thanks to Trump’s talented chief financial officer at the time, Stephen F. Bollenbach, the casinos would emerge with a reasonable bet on the future (though only for a few years, as it turned out. Trump later mismanaged his casino company anew and it fell into bankruptcy again eight years later, in 2004). Other Trump businesses also failed at various times, netting him six major failures in all. As such businesses failed, he stuck plenty of subcontractors with unpaid bills.

Quite the smudge on his escutcheon, one might say.

Trump later distinguished afresh himself with my colleague. Light got hold of his financial information and learned that Trump had a negative net worth. As recounted by another colleague, some of Light’s work drove Trump to march into the top editor’s office at BusinessWeek. There, Trump launched into a three-hour tirade that included an anti-Semitic gibe about Light (who informed Trump he was, in fact, Episcopalian). Trump also threatened to sue, but backed off after our lawyer told him his finances would then be opened to public disclosure in court.

Does this all add up to a man of character, a man of integrity, a man of honesty, a man of proven success, a man who should lead our country?

Gen. John Kelly, source: Stars and Stripes

What of the Trump seen by many of those who worked closely with him in his term as president? Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper called him a “threat to democracy.” Former national security adviser John Bolton declared him “unfit to be president.” John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and Trump’s former chief of staff, called him “a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators” and “has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” His own former vice president, Mike Pence, could not endorse him.

Back in 2016, a minority of American voters – less than 46% — elected Trump. That suggests most Americans were onto him even then, though not enough in the states that tilted the Electoral College his way. What will happen this time? Will enough voters feel like this 78-year-old’s shtick has grown tired, as Noonan suggested?

Studies show that many voters are stubborn. Especially in our polarized times, they tend to stick by their choices, no matter how much negative information they are presented with. Some voters also tend to be irrational, sometimes motivated even unconsciously by such factors as racism and fear. (Of course, Trump plays into both those factors, and likely is seen by some voters as the strong white man at a time when some whites can’t handle changing American demographics).

Will voters ignore Trump’s many flaws again, as so many did in 2016? Even more than before, this campaign keeps bringing those shortcomings into sharp relief. Will enough sensible voters see him this time for what he is? Will they have the good sense and the spine to act on that? Perhaps we can hope that enough will not be like that sadly uninformed slots player foolishly touching her false idol so many years ago.